This week we unpacked tla’s and a fla. Confused? A three letter abbreviation (TLAs) and a four letter abbreviation (FLAs). I guess I should show my colours. I hate random abbreviations. They represent an approach to working which tends to exclude. To me they are like a heightened version of jargon.
The fla was BHAG. Big Hairy Audacious Goals. You think tech might be male dominated? You think we could take a little less testosterone with that? Well, we did. So our BHAG is our plan to Better Help All (priority) Groups … You can call me a snowflake if it pleases you.
One of the key tasks of the week was to map problems we were seeking to address in terms their usefulness to stakeholders – and our ability to work this problem in to a prototypable form in the next 6 weeks.
Once we had our problems mapped on to a grid, a bit Dynamo style magic happened as priorities appeared in the 4 quadrants.
So, priority 1 = highly feasible and highly useful (instruction, do first).
Priority 2 = highly useful but less feasible (instruction, do next).
Priority 3 = less useful but highly feasible (instruction, do later).
Priority 4 = less useful and less feasible (instruction, don’t do).
My performance on this task, like my fellow pragmatists, was hampered by our inability to state a problem devoid of a solution. Perhaps this is the result of working as a consultant for nearly 20 years. Clients largely hate you to just restate the problems … but after a number of redrafts and with insight from my colleague – we had problems broken down into bite sized pieces. When I say bite sized, you would not want to sit opposite me at dinner. But they were certainly manageable work packages.
Now, our challenge is to attempt to liberate ourselves from a purely utilitarian set of solutions. Of course, what we come up with has to work but we are trying to get a minimum lovable product (MLP) not a minimum viable product (MLV). See how those abbreviations have snook up on us…
Many years ago, in the days before movies were streamed, a friend of mine worked for an airline. The company realised that every carrier across the world basically had the same fleet of plane. It wasn’t the logo on the tail fin that defined the brand, it was the people the air crew that made you love the airline. They had a scheme called surprise and delight. Small budgets and a lot of discretion to build affinity with the customer. The example he gave was of the child coming home from holiday that missed the end of her movie – because the plane landed. The airline sent the child the child a £5 DVD. The family had spent maybe £5,000 on their flights. People who feel badly let down take a lot of bandwidth and tell anyone who will listen. The trick is to balance with the ‘and then out of the blue a DVD arrived… stories.”
In 2019, Collage Arts consulted with over 100 local young people about what they wanted Wood Green to be like. The younger the group, the less inhibited their answers were. One said, the town centre is boring – I want it to surprise me. I want seats that look like Sushi rolls.
As we get older, we because less able to freestyle our answers.
Again, many years ago a colleague took over a theatre. He asked his most regular audience members what shows they would like to see. They had clear ideas about what they liked. His next season’s programme reflected their choices. The season bombed. He met them again. Why didn’t you come to the shows you choose he asked? Well, the thing is, they said, we had seen all those shows before. When we said we liked it – we didn’t want the same again – we wanted you to use you knowledge to find us things we didn’t know we’d like. They had liked what they knew. He needed to know what they’d like but didn't know.
Working out what people need is easy. Working how to surprise and delight them is a bit of alchemy. Asking the right people the right questions is the start. But it is what you do with the brief that delivers your BHAG into a MLP…
In other news … we explored some of the issues about how we come back from Covid stronger. Our first line in the sand is to not let digitisation get in the way of our delivery. We are using a digital environment, and this will give us options about how we work with people – but we should not expect to suddenly see a digital reach that is significantly different to our off-line presence. We may grow into bigger shoes over time – but for now we are creating a digitised version of what we do.
Second, we started to explore what our digital environment would look like. Whilst our ability to share our digital content remains important – we can also explore how we can address other challenges.
One other legacy of the lockdown is that we have had to respond to events and opportunities. This has meant we have been communicating with our service users far more. There is also an underlying trend in our work which has seen us move from delivering projects to delivering programmes. Our response to COVID has also seen our senior management team thrive. What started as a push for survival has seen us create much stronger synergies between different parts of complex business. Since 2018 we have been pursuing a vision of arts-led regeneration and creative solutions to some of the most pressing challenges that our communities face.
2020 was a tough year – but we received recognition across the board for pushing economic, social and cultural agendas. We are increasingly seen as the boroughs go-to organisation. This means we are being asked to deliver complex work packages in shorter time frames. If we place a communications system into our digital mix – we could more easily manage our marketing and communications, our safeguarding and compliance and deliver even more opportunities to a wider constituency.
NADM – or Never a dull moment at Collage Arts.
Duncan Sones heads up communications, strategy, and new business development within Collage Arts.
Display image credit: @visualthinkery / @bryanmathers
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